


and if you have something to say (you'd better say it now)

by NotAFicWriter



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, let vex be the hurt part of hurt/comfort you tepid cowards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 06:30:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18794842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotAFicWriter/pseuds/NotAFicWriter
Summary: Anger can only keep you moving for so long before it becomes self-destructive, and Vex is not exempt from burn out.(aka, aka vex has a migraine in the plane of pandemonium and stabs percy, but only, like, a little bit.)





	and if you have something to say (you'd better say it now)

**Author's Note:**

> finally, i have wrangled this thing into submission, and hopefully i managed to take the wonderful advice offered by the kindest vohalika and the ever-guiding ladyofrosefire into account, as i very much tried. thank you both for helping me stumble my way through this thing since the episode aired. spoilers for the end of campaign one and the search for grog, though it takes a week or two after. title from glen hansard's "say it to me now", because even years later, laura bailey's attempt on my life will not go unnoticed.
> 
> i'm emotional about vex'ahlia de rolo. just so you know.

The thing is, at the moment, Vex doesn’t even feel especially angry.

Putting the sharp end of her hunting knife through the eye of a howler, she’s aware of the fact that she’s seething with anger, that every inch of her skin feels like staring at the sun for too long, but she’s conscious of it from a safe distance. Mainly, there’s only sensory details. There’s the wet feeling of gore dripping from her hand, as the creature jolts to a halt mid-lunge, the long line of bite marks climbing up both her forearms, humming more so than aching, and the irritating vibration of a pulse in her eardrum, at a remove.

For the most part, she just feels cold. There’s no sunlight in the Plane of Pandemonium, and what ambient light exists is diffused by the sand in the air— even when she’s acting on her blessing from Pelor, casting her own daylight, it’s rendered in sepia and difficult to see though. She doesn’t entirely remember summoning it up, only noticing it when the remaining eye of the howler, gone cloudy, reflects back at her a white gleam. When she glances down at her hands, they don’t look like they’re glowing hot, they look like bones that had been bleaching in the sun, colorless and painful to look at. They’ve been down here too long, she misses the sun, misses natural light. Everything feels overexposed in Pandemonium, all brittle and loud, too hot and too sharp and too cold and too dry. She pries the corpse off the knife with her boot, rolling it off of her chest and getting back to her feet.

Vex doesn’t try to keep track of how many howlers there are left ahead of her, they were hard to count before, coming in seemingly endless droves when they were already exhausted from a previous fight against an exiled giant, and are harder to count now, set in stark relief by the harsh light. A grievously-wounded howler lunges for her leg, its teeth sinking in a quarter-inch into her calf guard before the effects of Pelor’s blessing reduce it to fly ash. There’s an intense pressure behind her right eye, deep-seeded. Numbly, she considers the thought of bleeding the pressure out somehow, like lancing an abscess, before resuming the search for where in the Hells she dropped her bow when the howler had bowled her over.

It’d been an ambush, though they really hadn’t expected something called a _howler_ to be capable of being an ambush predator. After eleven days of traveling through Pandemonium, they were exhausted enough that they didn’t see it coming (the problem wasn’t the howling outside fucking with them; the problem was when you came back indoors and _kept hearing it_ ) and they walked right into the howler den before they had a chance to stop and heal after their last encounter. A few chance surprise attacks left the majority of the party whelmed for a few rounds of combat, shaking off paralysis to the best of their ability, and that had been enough to back Percy and her into a corner from which they could not easily pick off targets at a distance, scrabbling at melee. She’d lost Fenthras after a lucky bite had torn into the tendon of her left forearm. Its teeth had slipped past the armor and right into the leather vanguard beneath, and she couldn’t seem to grip securely with her dominant hand afterwards, three of five fingers going lax and unresponsive, the string bowing out in her grasp and falling somewhere.

After that, things had gone a little hazy.

Despite the fact that hardly any of the original pack remained, a lingering canine runs into her field of vision, teeth bared and saliva forming a thick lather at its mouth.

“Stop,” she says, and she doesn’t intend for it to come out as a command. In her mind, she means it pleadingly, but, even though she can hardly hear it herself, it sounds furious. She’s angry, she knows, but it’s hard to fathom, like this. There’s rage just above her, just beyond her, just out of hand. She repeats, “Stop. There’s nothing left here. Your pack is _gone, why are you still fighting_?”

To her surprise, the howler hesitates, growling where it stands. It’s face is a strange cross between wolfish and apelike, but there’s cognition there— shrouded, but present.

It’s uncanny, a pack predator existing alone. She supposes this one is the last remaining of the ambush, smaller and rangier than the others were. It stands as though there ought to be more of its kin around it, absent its own context. It ought to be, she thinks, that a pack hunter like this shouldn’t be able to exist alone, that it ought to drop dead as soon as its family did, for its own wellbeing.

After a moment of hesitation, the shrieking wind, the humming pressure behind her eyes, the spell breaks. The howler advances.

Vex doesn’t try to speak to it again, knowing it won’t listen and can’t understand, and when it makes to bite, she strikes first, slitting its throat. She doesn’t often have reason to fight with a blade, much less her hunting knife, much more a tool in hand for skinning and butchering than a weapon. But this— finding the vital arteries and making quick work of them— this, she’s familiar with. It drops without ceremony, the cut plain and clean, and bleeds for a minute longer, kicking its back legs involuntarily like a dog running in its sleep, before finally stilling. Despite herself, she can’t bring herself to look away from it, to watch anything except the last dregs of life evaporate off of it.

It takes a minute for roaring sound in her ears to quiet enough for her to hear someone calling her name. Like everything else, it sounds far away, and repeats several times before she starts looking for the source of it.

_“Vex!”_

On impulse, she moves deeper into the storm, avoiding the voice calling for her. It’s familiar, and she can hear the faint urgency in it under the wailing of the wind, wanting for her, but she’s exposed here. All this noise and all this light makes the storm seem quieter by comparison, cooler and more relaxed, as though, if she kept moving into it, she’d find some peace of mind.

Or, she supposes, something else to kill. Either one will do.

_“Vex’ahlia!”_

Against the pull to keep walking away from the sound, towards the pleasant, thrumming white noise of the storm, she closes her eyes tightly and turns herself physically towards the sound. It’s a hard pull, like the rivers in the Feywild, where just passing in proximity to them was enough to tempt you under the waves. Numbly, she’s conscious that something is wrong, but it is not more pressing than the sway to lean back into the winds.

While she’s part ways into the motion of turning back towards it, she feels a hand make a failed catch at her shoulder, slipping over the curved plane of her armor, grabbing at her sleeve on the way down. Remembering hands, remembering hands grabbing at her hands, covering her mouth and pulling her under, when she was alone and Vax was nowhere to be seen, she lashes out before making a decision to, seeing more than hearing Percy’s hiss when she cuts him with the hunting knife shallowly across the upper arm.

Despite the cut, he only backs up momentarily, bringing both hands up where she can see them. His firing gloves protect most of the bare skin of his hands, but she can see the spots where they’ve started to darken and singe from contact, the exposed tips of his fingertips blistering from touching her skin. She blinks, and her eyes are warm under her eyelids, every square millimeter of skin radiating a feverish heat. She feels as though she might catch them both on fire.

Percy reaches up and slowly takes off his mask, adjusting his glasses in an attempt to limit his exposure to the sand scratching across his face. He looks at her like someone watching a star detonate.

Which is to say: he squints painfully.

“Far be it from me to ask you to hide your light under a bushel, dear,” he says, in his best overly-prim, trying-to-make-you-laugh affectation, “but this may be a little excessive.”

Despite everything, Vex can’t help but smile at that, if only for a moment. There’s a bead of blood forming at where the hunting knife grazed him, added along a dozen of other cuts and bruises glaring out at her, getting caked over with sand, and he’s still trying to draw out a smile at a time like this. But allowing herself to acknowledge the impulse makes real everything looming at the outskirts, and just the mention of it, she feels her breath tighten in her chest, a dry heat gathering, like kindling smoldering behind her ribcage, feeding off what little air present.

Impossibly, Percival shutters his eyes even further. Near-unseeing, he reaches out one hand and shades his vision with the other, touching the side of her forearm, then up further to cup her jaw in his palm. He’s lower than he naturally is, a wound at his knee forcing him to half-kneel, his wounded leg wobbling precariously. They both pretend as though they can’t notice his glove singing off at the point of contact, the charcoal smell of skin burning. His jaw clenches, but he doesn’t flinch otherwise.

“Vex,” he says, his humor gone, “I need you here now. You know my vision is dreadful, if you keep walking into the sandstorm, I won’t be able to find my way back.”

She can vaguely tell that he’s reframing the situation to make himself appear more helpless to get her to focus, but it works. Not necessarily on the fact that they’re in the heart of the storm, she was well aware of that, but of how far they are from the party. Vex looks over his shoulder, and there’s a wide gulf between them and the faint shape of the group, just little insignificant figures, milling about on the horizon. It felt as though she’d only gone a few steps into the wind, that they were hardly out of earshot.

The wind howls, and the light reflecting off of the lenses of Percy’s glasses dims an increment.

Standing upright, he takes a step closer, a faulty one that almost has him dropping to his knees, and she reaches out to stabilize him, to catch him by the shoulder and hold him there. Instead, she meets him halfway in the circle of his arms, one around her waist and the other cupping the back of her head, and she resists for a moment, afraid of what stopping might mean right now, afraid of burning both of them to cinders, but quickly relents. It is quieter, close to him, a familiar comfort in foreign territory. She presses her forehead to his shoulder, where his coat feels cool and smells like him.

Vaguely, she’s conscious of her grip loosening on the knife, the hilt slick and slippery between her wet fingers. Pelor’s blessing is not so easily dismissed as a candle to be blown out, but the heat bleeds out like sickness from an infection, until Percy’s fingers can comfortably run through her ruined braid, as gently as you please.

He’s making a soft sound, rumbling through his chest, and if there are words in his murmur he’s either too tired to enunciate them or she’s too haggard to pick them out. When he starts to lightly sway, she lifts her arms to hold on to him, as though they can share the weight between them, but he’s just listing, rocking in a self-soothing way.

After a moment, he clears his throat. “Trinket’s probably worried sick about you, you know,” he says, well aware that Trinket is in the necklace and probably still unconscious, and so unable to see them. The fear of getting lost in the storm here is suddenly more present than before, when she considers the possibility of Trinket, if she falls, being trapped here for eons to come.

“I’m sorry, darling,” she says, muffled into his shoulder, “I don’t know what came over me.”

“Vex,” he breaths, drawing the word out long and incredulous. “You have absolutely _nothing_ to apologize for. Not a thing.”

She lifts her head up from his shoulder to look down at the gash she made along his upper arm, bleeding sluggishly. Percy shakes his head, and she feels it more than sees. “Not even that, dear.”

She raises her hand to cover her face with, her temples pulsing with the aftermath of a ferocious headache. “How long have I been walking?”

“It’s a little hard to tell,” he admits. “We weren’t keeping a close eye on you when you started off, and you were well within the heart of the storm by the time Keyleth spotted you.”

“She’s good at that.”

“She is. I keep good time, but I have no way of telling exactly— I’d say ten minutes, fifteen before I caught up. Scanlan set up the mansion, if you’d like to go home.”

The mention of home sparks another round of tension at the back of her skull, and she rubs her eyes with the heel of her hand hard enough that Percy makes a little distressed sound that would’ve been drowned out in the wind but for their proximity. He takes her wrist in his, and softly urges her to uncover her face, grimacing when he notices the bite marks and torn muscle there, but setting it aside to cup her face again, bringing it to his.  
“It isn’t home,” she says. Her voice doesn’t sound like her own, too hoarse and choked off, not at all how she feels right now, scalding and scalded. “The mansion— it _isn’t_.”

“Oh, dear,” Percy says, pained, as though that’s the only words he has.

Like a child, Vex feels hopelessly contrary. She doesn’t want to go into the mansion right now, where the walls are made up for a daughter Scanlan still has elsewhere and yelled his voice raw at Vex bringing to his ritual, a year ago; doesn’t want to find the room at the end of the hall facing the space where a twin door once was, so cleanly removed from existence to spare them the pain of looking at it. She doesn’t want to back to Greyskull Keep, she hardly wants to go back to Whitestone right now, to her home and her hearth and her city.

She wants her mother’s house, reduced to white cinders, and she wants her mother, reduced to ash, and she wants her brother, reduced to dust. She wants out of this storm and out of this plane, before it erodes her down, like a hill to sand. She wants somewhere dark and safe were the things she loves have no threat of dissolving in her hands. She wants and she wants and she _wants_.

“I don’t know why I’m so _angry_ ,” she yells in Percy’s face, like it’ll fix things. “I don’t want to feel like this anymore.”

“You don’t have to,” he says, raising his voice to be heard, but only barely. “You’re angry because it’s easier than being hurt. I know how it is, dear. I know. But if you want it to stop, you’re going to have to _let it happen_.”

When Vex opens her mouth to speak, she feels as though a calk caught in her throat gives way. The winds carry enough sand against them that when she reaches up to wipe her tears away to see, the thick layer of wet dust just scratches against the back of her eyelids, and she hisses, the sound damp and unhappy.

Percy pulls away from her, leaving her hanging unsupported, crying against her best attempts to force it down and rattling like a creature in a wrought cage. “Don’t, don’t—” he mumurms, equally distraught. Before she has a chance to reach for him again, he retrieves an utterly abased excuse for a handkerchief and cups her face, mopping uselessly under her eyes with it before she has a chance to scratch her corneas further. When that fails to be productive either, he clicks his tongue and forces it back into his pocket as though it’s personally offended him, and hands her, instead, his mask.

“Can’t have our sharpshooter damaging her vision,” he says, as explanation.

“Hey,” she says, sniffling and trying her best with the straps. “ _One_ of our sharpshooters.”

She manages the mask itself, but struggles with tightening the back buckles a moment longer before he reaches back and, with utmost care, helps her with them. “There,” he says, tender enough that she has to read his lips over the dying storm. His eyes are red and his gaze soft, sand gathering at his lower eyelids. “There we are. You wear that as long as you need.”

It’s an odd thing, to be on the other side of Percy’s mask for once. The goggles fog up very quickly, though she can hardly fault it for that, being with how much she’s dissolving into tears right now. Her head still hurts, in the way that one’s head always hurt after a long, exhausting cry, but the mask feels secure, enough that she can see the appeal. She wouldn’t like to live here, behind the mask, but it is a pleasant enough place to visit, cool and quiet, safe and sound. When she lifts her arms around Percy shoulders and slots them together again, the beak of it juts against his chest, and he lets it, and they sway together, two derelicts, twisting in the wind.

* * *

It’s not until much after, while he’s finishing up rinsing the worst of the muck off, that Percy thinks of the right thing to say.

Well. Maybe it’s not _the_ right thing to say, but is a _righter_ thing to say than anything he came up with in the moment. The whole walk back to the where Scanlan had cast up the mansion, she’d had her head down in her hands, covered by the mask, and he could think of nothing to say but to gesture to the bow slung over his back when she’d started to search around for Fenthras, and that had only seemed to make her more upset. They’d hobbled the way together, him leaning on her more than once, in relative silence, a little embarrassed by their own honesty.

Which was stupid. What do you marry someone for if not for the purpose of having someone to be upsettingly genuine with and not feel an ounce of shame over it?

When he comes out of the bath and enters their room with a towel wrapped around his waist, she’s still lying in bed on her side, facing the wall, and he can tell that she hasn’t fallen back asleep yet since it was her turn in the washroom. She’d complained of a blistering headache earlier, and, having no magic left between them to scrounge up a restoration spell, Pike had sent her to bed with a draught for the pain. It didn’t quite put her to sleep, but it kept her rested in an odd twilight state for a little while, not quite asleep and not quite awake.

She awake enough to shift in the blankets when he comes in, turning over onto her back to look at him as unwraps the towel and leaves it to dry. She’s careful not to put too much weight on her arm as she does so, moving as tenderly on her bandaged arm as he does on his wounded knee. “No union suit tonight, darling?” she asks, and her voice is still a little scratchy in her throat.

“There’s too much sand for it,” he says, “it’ll turn into glasspaper as soon as I try to take it off.”

“No need for you to be flayed alive before we get our cleric back in healing order.” Vex moves over again, turning over the edge of the bedsheets to make room for him to slide in. “I can’t patch your skin back on so easily.”

“You’re a very capable tailor, dearest.”

She smiles, then, but it’s a morose smile, pained. Rather than fitting into his usual side of the bed, he sits upright under the covers, folding his hands in his lap. “When I was fourteen, my sister Vesper tried to teach me how to shave. My father was a little busy, balancing the younger siblings, and Julius was sixteen then and wouldn’t shave on principle, so she set herself up to the task, being the eldest.”

For a moment, Vex goggles at him incredulously, visibly trying for the life of her to understand what in the Nine Hells he was going for, but soon, the stare slides off to amused curiosity, willing to play along. “I can’t imagine that went off without a hitch,” she says.

“ _Nooo,_ ” Percy says. “Do you remember when Vax shaved off half of Grog’s beard, and he drew the other half on with a rock he found?”

That selfsame pained look runs across Vex’s countenance, quick as a dagger, but she doesn’t entertain it long for the sudden bark of laughter following it. “Oh no,” she says.

“Worse. At the time I had this,” he gestures in vain at his chin, “this oily, translucent stubble, it was monstrous, and Vesper could hardly see it while she was trying to guide me through the steps. She gave it a valiant effort, but I ended up with uneven patches of see-through whiskers on either side of my face, like a rabbit, which went so well with the bifurcated lip.”

Vex clicks her tongue at him, as though disappointed by his performance, ten years belated. “You went and got cut up?”

“I went and had my face _mangled_ by my eldest sibling,” he says, “I had a horrible cut, right through my upper lip. I looked like I tried to eat a straight razor. It’s since faded, but for the longest time, I had a hideous scar from it, right here.”

“Let me see?”

Percy leans closer to her on the bed, and when she rest a hand on her face, it is a far thing from the scorching of her skin earlier that day, only feeling the slightest bit overwarm. He guides her thumb to where the scar used to be, and she traces the faint remnants gently. “It doesn’t seem too hideous to me,” she says, leaning closer and pressing first a kiss to his upper lip, then following it down to his mouth.

It’s a chaste kiss. They’re both tired, too tired to pursue this any further, and their lips both chapped and cut from the day spent in dry wind, but her mouth is soft and familiar.

“Mm,” he says, on separating, keeping close and quiet, “I’ve always wanted someone I’m legally and financially attached to to tell me I’m not disfigured beyond repair.”

She smiles, showing her teeth. “That’s what I’m here for darling— I’m here to make all your dreams come true.”

Percy’s breath leaves his chest in a fond huff, marveling at the truth of that statement. “Dear,” he says, then stops. “They killed Vesper first, I think. She was a prodigious fencer, but not enough.”

Vex’s hand, her injured one, combs through the hairs at the back of his neck, comforting. It’s not his intention to solicit emotional labor from her right now, but against his better senses, he indulges in it, letting her hold him in the palm of her hand. “I’m sorry, Percy,” she says.

“That wasn’t,” he starts. “Ah, that wasn’t my intention. I’m not— I’m not telling you this because I’m looking for solace. Do you remember Ioun’s library?”

Pondringly, she rasps through his shorter hairs with the blunt ends of her nails, as though tracing out her thoughts. She is already out ahead of him, he can tell, thinking three steps forward and one back to meet him halfway. “It all matters?” she quotes.

He nods, the motion shifting her hand over from her neck to the side of his head, and she thumbs at the shell of his ear, undeterred. “I tried to find Vesper’s book there, you know. I hadn’t succeeded but— I… I’d never told our parents about her trying to teach me to shave, you know. They’d have her hide for it, so she made me promise not to tell.”

Vex’ahlia, an experienced sister, asks, “And what did she bribe you with?”

Percy blushes at the memory and lowers his head. “She talked one of the fencing students she studying with into tutoring me. I had a _mortifying_ crush on him at the time.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Vex coos empathetically, coming close to kiss his brow. “You poor thing. With the stitches on your lip?”

“Four of them,” he says, gesturing again to the faded mark, “like a hare. I did take him up on the lesson, which obliterated all traces of affection I had for him. He had Gods-awful footwork.” At the curling of her smile into something devious, he huffs, indignant. “You shush.”

“I didn’t say a word, Percival.”

“Of course you didn’t, you fiend.”

Somewhere along the conversation, they’d come to be about halfway wrapped around each other, just bracing each other up in this loose embrace, for the solitude of it. Percy breathes, and the details are small and sensory. The brush of loose hair, the fabric of the blankets around them, the woodsmoke smell of her skin. He bows briefly to kiss her shoulder. “It’s a memory only I have of her, out of a thousand memories only I and Cassandra have of our family. And it hurts, to be the only one to carry them, and seeing the library, it… it lessened that, somewhat, knowing that there’s someone else, remembering her life. When we lose someone, we lose everything that they might’ve been, the person they could’ve grown to be throughout our lives, and that’s… enraging.”

Vex nods, her face unreadable.

“But it’s also _exhausting_ , being the sole proprietor of all of these memories that only you have, knowing that you’ll never have any more. It’s heavy, like you have to keep carrying this person with you now. And you can’t, you can’t just find somewhere to put those memories down, because that hurts even worse.”

“Feels like losing them all over again,” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “Exactly. But they don’t give you a choice— as time goes on, the memories get blurrier, and less distinct. It’s like.”

In vain, he brings a hand towards his chest and then dismisses it, unsure of where he was going with the motion.

“When you came back from the dead,” he asks, “did you ever feel like you left something behind? And you can never tell what it was, until you reach for something inside of yourself and found it absent?”

Vex doesn’t answer. There is a distant look in her eyes, a disquieting expression that he can’t name or understand. How tiring it must be, he imagines, to die three times and hold it tight and soundless in your chest, like a euthanized animal, like a tourniquet around a wound where a severed limb once was.

She looks down.

“It hurts to carry,” he says, “and you can’t put it down. So let me carry it a while.”

It takes her a second to respond, jolting upright. “What?”

“I know it sounds illogical, but,” he says. “I’ve been angry for a very, very long time, because being angry keeps you moving, and it hurts less than letting yourself grieve, but that’s a good way to run yourself aground, dear, and you helped me see that. I would be a pretty shit husband if I let you do the same.”

Covering her eyes with her hand, she snorts, barely resisting a smile.

“So,” he says. “So, we’re both suffering, carrying these things. I’ll tell you some of mine, and you’ll tell me some of yours. And then there’ll be at least one other person in the world who knows them. We can share the weight, as much as we can.”

“We’ll keep them alive in retelling?” she asks, sounding disbelieving.

“In a sense,” he pleads. “It doesn’t have to be about Vax, it doesn’t have to be anything important or painful. It can just be a small thing.”

When she bites her lip, unsure, he continues, “You are an immensely strong person, Vex. Stronger than me by far. But earlier today,” he sighs. “You looked like you were about to catch on fire, with all that heat and pressure.”

She catches his hand with hers, running the few fingers in her dominant hand that she can still move with her injury along the blisters and burns on his palm. “I’m sorry.”

“Dearest,” he says, “that wasn’t under your control. I know who I married, and keeping you from walking off into the wasteland is more than worth a couple pairs of singed gloves. And needing a hand is nothing you should feel you need to apologize for. As far as explosive anger goes, yours left very little scorched earth.”

She’s quiet for a while. Eventually, she shifts a little ways away from him, further down the bed, folding her hands together in contemplation.

“Our mother was a seamstress, you know,” she says.

“Is that how you learned to, uh,” he reaches up to tug at the collar of his coat, which she’d spent an impressive amount of time repairing after the incident with the bugbears and his arm, before remembering that he wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing and coughing, embarrassed.

“Yes, she taught Vax and I how to patch clothing. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

“Sometime?”

“Yes, darling, sometime. For tonight, why don’t you come here?”

She turns back onto her side, lifting up the covers to up to her shoulder and gesturing for him to lay down. He lowers himself onto his side as well, so that they’re facing one another, and she pulls the covers up higher, until, with the candles melting down to flickering ends, the room is dark and they are covered and quiet, small and safe, altogether.


End file.
